Here's something I did not know until today, courtesy Tom Hawthorn's great Globe obituary of the even greater Le Grand Orange, Rusty Staub:

...It was in Vancouver (for an exhibition game) that (Expos) manager Gene Mauch convinced the outfielder to alter his swing to better pull the ball for power, as he had only hit five home runs into the first week of June. "I just bent my knees a little and dropped my hands a bit and started swinging, and it just felt free," Mr. Staub recounted in John Robertson's 1971 biography, Rusty Staub of the Expos. He hit batting-practice homer after batting-practice homer at Capilano (now Nat Bailey) Stadium in Vancouver.

"That was the day that I became a home-run hitter again," he later said...

"...Sell BC Hydro’s generating and transmission assets at depreciated market value to a new BC Electric Company financed by a reformed bcIMC and owned by the pension fund and current employees with government continuing to hold shares. Public pension funds would be kept at work in BC instead of being invested abroad, funding the tobacco industry, arms dealers, Chinese state-controlled enterprises and other undesirable investments.

BC Hydro is already a financial basket case. Aging plant, worthless assets (about $7 billion of intangibles and deferred costs), unprofitable markets and a changing energy landscape means it cannot survive long term without huge subsidies from the province. Selling generating and distribution assets and paying off the enormous existing secured debt would leave a company with no ability to continue. It would have to declare its insolvency, unable to pay contractors.

IPPs could do contracts with the new company and ones that serve local needs would find success. Those expecting to sell power profitably to a public utility so that agency can sell it into money losing markets might not fair as well..."

Seems to me that the fine folks who currently hold the decision making power when it comes to such matters just might want to unplug their ears and start paying attention to Norm (once again).

If those figures were extrapolated, tens of thousands of apps, if not more, were likely to have systematically culled “private and personally identifiable” data belonging to hundreds of millions of users, (former Facebook platform operations manager Sandy) Parakilas said...

And, as Mr. Parakilas notes, Facebook, and its very small boss, turned a blind eye to pretty much all of it until 2014.

Why the change, then?

Well...

That is not entirely clear, but there is speculation that some of the data harvests had become so large that the book of faces folks may have come concerned that the biggest harvesters themselves would soon set up their own social networks.

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd...

{snip}

...Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”...

{snip}

...Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:

Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”

Simon Milner: “No.”

Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”

Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?” Nix replied: “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”

And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that – at least in 2014 – that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately...

Fifty.

Million.

So, what did they do with the profiles?

The young Mr. Wylie explains...

______If you want in-depth analysis and (mostly, I think) algo-free commentary make sure you read (and bookmark) Marcy Wheeler.Couldn't happen/hasn't already happened here?....The MoS explains why you might want to think again.And on that other thing I've been blathering on about recently....If Ontario had prop-rep would the entire country be concerned about the good Mr. Ford's political future at the moment?Finally, Jody Paterson explains why, for her at least, it is difficult not to wonder about motives and long held beliefs when it comes to the recent change of heart writing of Martyn Brown in the G Straight...It's hard not to conclude that she has a point..

Friday, March 16, 2018

The following is the lede of Douglas Todd's (most excellent) piece on the forces of 'No' aligned against Prop-Rep in today's VSun:

This year is certain to include more high-profile nay-saying from the well-funded opponents of proportional representation. They seemed omnipresent during B.C. referendums in 2005 and 2009, when the possibility of electoral reform fell less than three percentage points short of the 60 per cent threshold needed then to change the polarized way we do partisan politics in this province...

How will we ever stand our ground against the wave and all the prop-bombs that are sure to be buried within it?

Well...

We think that is something that Merv Adey would have wanted to help us deal with in a rational, calm, and fact-based manner.

Saturday, March 10, 2018

Thanks to the generosity of many of you, not to mention the hard work Norm Farrell, Merv Adey's fantastic family and some very fine local journalism-type folks, we will soon be unveiling Merv's next project...

_______In case you're new around here...Merv Adey, like BC Mary before him, was one of the best BCPoli bloggers ever....For all the right reasons.Oh, and before I forget.... Norm wants me to remind you all that you can still contribute to the Merv Fund....Here.

Monday, March 05, 2018

The following is the 'wave away' from Rob Shaw's bizarre deflector spike spin piece on how Horgan has been acting just like Clark, re: Hydro in yesterday's VSun:

...As veteran energy analyst David Austin noted at a recent B.C. Utilities Commission hearing, you could fire all of Hydro’s staff, cancel all its private power contracts, and the corporation would still have to keep raising rates because its true cost pressures lie in paying for all its deferral accounts, building and upgrade projects...